Last week, I presented an idea about indexing messages from webmails in Nepomuk. The summary of this idea is to implement a browser extension for Firefox, Chrome and Konqueror. This extension parses the DOM tree of every page visited by the user that belongs to a webmail. When e-mails are found, they are extracted and stored in a temporary file. Nepomukfileindexer then quicks in and indexes these e-mails in the Nepomuk database.

The reason why I started this experiment is because many users use webmails instead of mail client programs like KMail or Thunderbird. The information about these emails cannot therefore be indexed by Nepomuk. As there are many different webmails, the biggest part of the project is to implement parsing rules for each of them. The browser plugin itself is quite small.

Extracting Information From the DOM Tree

Last week, I implemented the file indexers that are responsible of indexing mbox files and MIME files into the Nepomuk database. These indexers are now in a fairly good shape. This week, I started to implement the browser plugins. I ...read more...

The crafters of the LinuxMint distro are in a ticklish position. Mint is based on Ubuntu, which in turn, is based on Debian, which in turn, has the moveable feast of the Linux kernel as its underpinning.

Porting more plugins

In my last blog posting I wrote about the port of Marble’s Graticule and MeasurementTool plugins to an object based scene management. These ports change how the plugins draw their visual representation. The ported plugins used to draw directly to the scene. After porting they now create geometric objects and add them to the scene. These objects are then drawn by the rendering engine. Well, this is not the whole truth. At least not for now. The “scene” is a simple list of geometric objects at the moment and is meant to be a placeholder. Thats where the scenegraph will be plugged in. But lets get back to the render plugins I have ported during the last weeks.

The APRS plugin

The APRS plugin does collect and visualize APRS data (Automatic Packet Reporting System). The port was rather trivial with all the knowledge from previous ports. I also thought about using placemarks with track information for the data points. Since this will require a lot of refactoring to the plugin code ...read more...

The openSUSE conference had some chats about strategy. Ralf talked about suggestions from SUSE in his keynote and there were more suggestions discussed in person between various people. I'd like to summarize some of the things I heard. In this blog I will talk about the directions of Factory, what Ralf mentioned as SUSE's ideas from his keynote; later this week I will blog about the openSUSE releases.

This is a combination of stuff I heard (not just at oSC but also earlier - even from the first strategy discussion, 3 years ago) and ideas I have. I just attempt to put it into text so it is easier to shoot at, comment upon, think about.

Factory

Let's start with talking about Factory.

Who is it for

We need to think about who factory is for, how these people are supposed to be using it etcetera. Right now, we have a shared understanding - but it probably isn't ...read more...

In recent versions of Dolphin, the view sometimes looked like this just after entering a directory.

Some of the files and sub-directories have “unknown” icons, which are replaced by the correct icons later.

This will not happen any more in Dolphin 4.11.

Why did we show you “unknown” icons at all in the first place?

Dolphin can show you a lot of information about your files. Some of this information can be obtained quite easily, like, e.g., the name, the file size, and the modification time.

However, some other properties of a file or directory might be more expensive to determine. Examples are:

The type of a file: if it cannot be determined unambiguously from the file name, we have no choice but to read the contents of the file.

The icon that has to be shown for a file depends on the type. A directory icon, on the other hand, can be chosen by the user in the “Properties” dialog. The chosen custom icon is then stored ...read more...

KDE Project:

Project Neon is a fantastic resource for KDE developers giving daily builds for KDE software. It's maintained by the lovely Kubuntu community on the lovely Launchpad infrastructure. KDE developers can install the various bits they need to develop their part of KDE without having to worry about compiling everything themselves. It installs everything into /opt so it doesn't touch your normal software installation.

Thanks to the hard work of Harald and others we have the first KDE Frameworks 5 builds on Neon! I expect this to prove a vital resource in developing Frameworks 5.

Last year:

Well, last year I joined GSoC too, always with Gluon, and I wrote a working OCS server just for Gluon purposes. Of course it's not full featured neither bug free, but it's currently serving us at this address: http://gamingfreedom.org/v1/config. In addition, I developed the future Gaming Freedom web site that is using our OCS server too.

This year:

I started a partial rewrite of the Gluon Player which now uses QML and plasma components. Here is a screenshot of it running:

It currently supports login/logout and registering a new account but the target for the end of the project is to browse and play games. Also graphics isn't perfect and amazing but we can always improve it after having the application working.

What games?

With Akademy behind me and the situation about “what is master” in kde-workspace resolved I decided to switch my work away from Wayland towards getting KWin on top of Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5. After a few days of hacking the compilation of KWin is re-enabled in the frameworks-scratch branch of the kde-workspace git repository.

This means that KWin compiles, links and installs when compiling against KF5. A quite important step and only very few code areas got ifdefed. The preparation work of the last months showed it values as for example the compile errors due to QPixmap were extremely easy to resolve (just delete the code) without loss in functionality.

But of course at the moment KWin does not work yet when compiled against KF5 as the event filter is not yet ported to xcb. This is what I will focus on next so that we can soon start testing a KWin on 5 and start to adjust the areas which need to be tested against a running KWin, where “ship it, it compiles” is not enough.

This time we had a chance to interview Philip Koops who paints for a hobby and swears by the words of Picasso - "Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." An interesting conversation where he shares with us his views on Painting, Open Source Communities and much more. He also collaborated with us for the Krita Webshop and made us this uber-handsome Krita Bear!! Click on Read More to read the interview..

Hello Philip, would you like to tell us something about yourself?Sure, I'm over forty, married and father of two. I've always worked in a corporate environment (call-centre) and decided to have a shot at Freelancing because I thought it was my last opportunity to live the life I always dreamed of, and also because I would have more time for my family (working from home).

This is a bit of fun spoiling post, but sometimes we need to become constructively critical in order to improve the situation. As you may already know, Yocto has been advertised as the relatively new technology for creating custom distributions for you. Although, people commonly use Poky, Arago, and so forth ready-made distributions on top of Open Embedded.

Yocto Project

Cross-compilation

So, here is the critical issue for embedded developers using the cross-toolchain provided by Code Sourcer why I personally think that Yocto might not be usable for the moment for commercial projects where reliability is a main concern.

In short: it does not work if you would like to build the distribution (for instance stock Poky) for your embedded board, like ARM with the sourcery toolchain.

What makes me worry a bit more, this cross-toolchain environment was working in the first ...read more...

I don’t even know how to start this one but wow, when I think my life can’t get worst it surprises me again.

So last month I started a campaign in Indeigogo about Litteras a new email client with EWS (Exchange) support. It was great, in like 2 days I had 5% of the goal, but then it stuck completely, that was probably because I failed to blog more about it and it’s progress, but it also showed how I was wrong on thinking people dislike Akonadi, I got lots of feedback of users that like it, I gave it a second try and it was more or less what I had experienced in the past. It worked with my Gmail account but still I don’t like it much, I was able to make kmail unusable by killing the mysql process, I should fill a bug but lots of things happened after this.

One of the greatest things of the campaign was that I was informed about KDSoap which is not on “Qt Soap”google search, right now ...read more...

Previous week I have attended Akademy 2031 conference. This year they joined forces with Qt Contributors’ Summit 2013, that’s why I am so lucky to attend even two global events the same time. In this report I would like to say about how it was. Seems like these keywords will fit theme of the whole report: kde, community, I, love, you.

Let’s start then. Day 1. It was kinda greeting party with some free wine and awesome music, which attendee and organisators were playing themselves. Greet music and paid Coke for me were great! :D I also got my badge (mum got her one next day).

I also had a conversation mostly with Kevin Krammer (thanks, Kevin!)

Day 2. Sessions started. It was great, a lot of new knowledge, etc. I listened everything and got a lot of important experience. Sessions are great, only one remark is I would like to have a bit more technical talks.

I boot into my Porteus sessions from a USB drive that holds not only the Porteus OS but all of the software modules that I added and all of the OS settings, so I have a uniform user experience on every computer I borrow to run Porteus Linux.

Something that works is good, but something that works great is better. These past days, I fixed many bugs and imperfections of the new Nepomuk Query Parser and the Query Builder widget. I will summarize theses fixes shortly, then will come the screenshots.

Syntax-highlighting, one more time

Before my holidays, I implemented the Query Builder widget as a syntax-highlighted QPlainTextEdit. This was easy and fun, and the result looked quite nice. You can find the whole story here.

After that, I decided to rewrite the implementation from scratch to give it a different look. I wanted to have boxes around parsed terms, with a small cross to remove them. After some days, the widget looked like that:

This widget was really nice, but its implementation did not seem very clean. Furthermore, the widget was made of a complex tree of line edits, buttons and widgets responsible for drawing the boxes. Handling the cursor position (and the text itself) was a bit hackish, and some things did not ...read more...

tl;dr: If you are a committed KDE contributor and not a KDE e.V. member, you are doing it wrong. If you are a KDE user, consider helping the KDE User Working Group. Read KDE e.V.’s quarterly reports.

Akademy 2013 is still on it’s way, and as usual the KDE e.V. General Assembly was held as a part of it. KDE e.V. is the representation and governance body of the KDE community. Membership in this not-for-profit association registered in Berlin, Germany is open to all KDE contributors . Members usually assemble once a year to coordinate, to vote on issues important to the community and to elect representatives and board members as needed. The highlights this year where the discussion of the role of the Community Working Group, the report on the first activities of the newly established Financial Working Group, and the election of one new board member. I was the chairperson of the assembly, and this is my inofficial report. ...read more...

Akademy 2013 is in its final days. Yesterday we had our day trip (or survival training day hehe, look at my Akademy 2013 photos from yesterday to see what I mean). I really liked the day trip, I like doing long walks.

At the end of the day trip we went to a restaurant to have dinner. I end up in the same table with the Italian guys. During our chat Luigi Toscano, from the KDE translation team, told me about what he did to translate the new Plasma NM applet faster. Since the new applet shares most of the strings with the current Plasma NM applet (in networkmanagement repository) he copied the .po files for Italian language from networkmanagement (current applet) to plasma-nm (new applet) and configured Lokalize to merge the strings. Sorry, I do not know the exact steps to do that in Lokalize.

Other translation teams can do the same to speed up translating Plasma NM to their languages. The same can be done when we create a new ...read more...

KDE Project:

The day started with a long release schedule BoF. No conclusion but less freezes seemed popular. Shorter release schedule seemed mostly popular with a 4 month schedule getting a fair bit of approval. Not ideal of us though as it would get things out of sync with the Ubuntu schedule.

Kubuntu dudes and Limux Munich rollout dude

In search of enlightenment KDE trecked along the great wall of Basque country.

This is just a very quick announcement that new rootfs tarballs of the current development branch of Plasma Active are available for ArchosG9 and Nexus7. These snapshots are not made based on Mer latest but on an older version. Additionally, to the stock Plasma Active installation these tarballs contain my nemo-compatibility package as well as some Nemomobile apps to show the general practicability of running Nemomobile apps on Plasma Active. The rootfs tarballs are available here:

Please note that the Nexus7 version needs a manual change that is currently not included in the .ks file: The setting for QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM in /etc/sysconfig/nemo-mobile-ui needs to be changed from “opengl” to “raster”.

Please also note that there is still a nasty bug that causes the Network Manager applet to be unusable. A workaround for connecting to a secured WLAN is, e.g., to use nmcli instead: nmcli d wifi connect “SSID” ...read more...